On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 11:15 PM Ángel <angel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 2022-06-13 at 18:32 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote: > > Yes, all that could be done in theory, but it'd take a lot of > > hacking and it's been decades and it hasn't happened. > > > > I'd rather have shell scripts "just work" in parallel with a minimum > > of fuss. > > If this hasn't happened, that might be because nobody found it > important enough to dive into such task, relatively to the effort > required (or estimated). > > Everyone wishes their configure scripts to finish quickly but, first > and foremost, the result must be right. Something which is easier with > serial script than with a parallel implementation. > > And in the case of configure, they are a mix of boilerplate code, m4 > and shell scripting, so not many people would be, in addition to > motivated by that task, proficient enough in all of those. Furthermore, > configure typically target really classic dialects, which makes even > more difficult to use modern features which could speed up the script. > > Optimizing that at bash would likely be even more complex, since it > could only automatically optimize the cases that would never have side > effects. > > I think that most gainings should probably come from autoconf blocks > with optimizations. Still, it might be possible through some loadable > builtin to improve the configure times. > > Do you have any handy example of configure that takes too long to run? Try Emacs. Jeff
